Once upon a time in the archives!

Musing to myself one evening, I started thinking about what films can have archives, archivists, records, strong rooms…inserted into the title, for example, ‘A fistful of records’. I came across the ‘There will be documents’ image while trawling the web. I wish I had the ingenuity and artistic talent to draw the image, unfortunately not, but the story behind this image highlights a welcome concept regarding copyright and image rights. I found the image on a website called Creative Commons

Creative Commons allows users to search their website to ‘share, remix, reuse – legally’. The idea behind Creative Commons is to provide ‘free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.’ The search criteria allows users to search for work to use for commercial purposes or to search for works to modify, adapt or build upon. A good introduction to what creative commons is about is Wanna work together . Hopefully the range of images, music and creative work will continue to increase.

Contributions are welcome for archives in film, especially pictorial ones!